Sen. Joe Lieberman’s, I-Conn., refusal to participate in a Democratic health care deal is murderous, simply murderous, says the Washington Post‘s astute, reserved Ezra Klein:
At this point, Lieberman is just torturing liberals. That is to say, he’s willing to directly cause the deaths of hundreds of thousands of people in order to settle an old electoral score.
Directly? That would mean Lieberman slitting the throats of the uninsured with his own hands. Surely “directly” is hyperbole. Oh wait, it is. Klein, uh, edited his post without noting the change to readers. (It now reads that he is “willing to cause….” That’s much better.)
To illustrate how Lieberman’s blood rage will directly kill people, Klein links to a study by the Urban Institute, which notes that it’s hard to get medical care when you don’t have insurance. Klein’s myopic solution to this problem: Have the government provide this insurance! The conservative solution: Make it easier to purchase your own insurance on the cheap.
Of course, the conservative solution is obviously a underhanded ploy to ensure the death of every uninsured human being on the planet (We like to call this the Anti-Reform League of Murder, but shhh, it’s a secret). Just ask Matt Yglesias, also of undisputed humility and deep curiosity:
But liberals members do have an incentive to compromise—the tens of thousands of people who die every year for lack of health insurance. The leverage that Lieberman and other “centrists” have obtained on this issue (and on climate change) stems from a demonstrated willingness to embrace sociopathic indifference to the human cost of their actions.
Huh. What an interesting talking point. It’s almost as if Klein and Yglesias were participating in some email group from which they drew information. Oh wait, they do.
Let’s keep in mind, all of this is coming from the same people critical of Sarah Palin for engaging in shameful hyperbole in referring to death panels.
